How Samba Live works to be the best webcasting software of 2019

Every year billions of dollars’ worth of products get pitched with live webinars, the best universities exhibit their lectures on live video to untold numbers of audience members, and every quarter more and more of the top performing corporations and institutions are using internal collaboration, podcasting, and video conferencing tools to boost their coordination throughout their structure.

The top organizations are all getting into webcasting wherever important ideas need to be shared.

Live webcasting solutions for professional use

They’re not choosing to use consumer-available software to do this with, and for a variety of very good reasons. What they are doing is they’re going for professional, enterprise-level software solutions to facilitate their often quite diverse needs in a way that’s feature rich enough for their admins to work with and make full use of, while simultaneously being incredibly intuitive and user-friendly on the front-end so that not every content producer and audience member needs to spend any effort at all learning new software. Clients like these organizations all have a very tall stack of demands. There’s only a few solutions that are suitable to meet all of them. Let’s see how they get met.

White-labeling and customizability

How professional would it be for a large corporation to hand you a product with another company’s logo on it? Would you feel safe banking online with a company whose website was visibly not their own? Why does that sketch us out like it does?

Whether you’re a university, hospital, bank, or government agency. You are an institution. Your audience and your employees have to have confidence and trust in what your institution is capable of. The whole experience for everyone involved needs to be a highly manicured process, like going to Disneyland in order to inspire complete trust of the user in the organization.

In fact, Disney uses white-labeled software. They don’t make all of their own software. But you can bet they brand it like it’s their own!

The aesthetics of your brand and organizational presence need to permeate every level of every interaction of what you do. To fail means to imply dependence on another organization. Not exactly what you want to unintentionally communicate when you are trying to deliver your most important ideas to your target audience.

Enterprise-level organizations whitelabel as much as possible to ensure every employee, and every end-user that they are within the ecosystem of the organization. It conveys that whatever the rest of the world can do, this company can do too. It’s a little detail that turns out to be a huge detail in every case where an organization is looking to take on the level of growth that leads to having actual impact.

It’s also not just about slapping a label over a piece of software and calling it a done day, either. The software itself has to be customizable down to every detail. If there’s a button somewhere that doesn’t look right, you need to be able to change that button. If there’s a feature you don’t want your audience to have for that particular time; you need to be able to remove that feature.

In short, major organizations cannot afford to have a tool that isn’t fully theirs.

Experience, support, and responsiveness

On top of having full customizability, administrators shouldn't have a hard time implementing the software. They need all kinds of technical documentation and support. There needs to be an actual software company with experience and expertise behind the software tools you use. A company that you can call and actually get not just a person but the exact expert your admin needs in order to resolve or clarify that particular issue at that time.

Customizability and feature depth is nothing without support. Plenty of ‘solutions’ out there will trap you with one or the other. Few do both. Even fewer do both very well.

Digital Samba is one of the very few software companies who have been in the business of teleconferencing, live video calls, file sharing, webcasting and anything that puts a presenter in front of an audience over the internet since its inception. Digital Samba has seen the whole industry evolve. And in many cases they’ve actually been the ones evolving it.

One of the traps that too many organizations fall into is support from borrowed innovation. In short, it’s when it turns out you thought you could rely on your service supplier, up until you have an uncommon technical issue, and then the buck doesn’t stop with who you were dealing with and it turns out you were dealing with a middle-man entity the entire time.

There’s an easy way to avoid that. By going directly to the companies who are actually doing the bare-bones innovation themselves.

Digital Samba has its own solution package for online collaboration and live webcasting. It’s called Samba Live. It checks all the boxes that you would want in a live video conferencing software package because it’s made by a company who set the standards that make the checkboxes.

Samba Live is cutting-edge software that’s fully customizable, absolutely supported, always a step ahead of the rest in innovation, and actually surprisingly affordable compared to other enterprise-level solutions.

That’s because most of those other solutions are actually middle-men companies and Digital Samba makes their software from the ground up using HTML5/webRTC, which ensures that front-end users on all platforms don’t even ever have to install a thing in order to use it.

Quality, clarity, and compatibility

Not all live streaming services are created equal, and not all services support professional live streaming.

All of the consumer-available video conferencing and webcasting services compress and degrade video clarity to save on bandwidth. This will inevitably result in a lesser quality presentation, which will have a negative effect on your brand value. Even worse, temporary outage and unstable streaming connections.

This is what you would be stuck with if the cheapest options were the only options. While it is true that just anyone can pick up a phone camera and go with services like YouTube or Facebook, it’s also true that just anyone can do that. And that means that your brand will be in the same association as everyone else who has used those consumer-purposed platforms.

There’s close to no control when using those services, and you’re pretty much at the mercy of whatever quality and bandwidth they happen to throw your way. You cannot self-host Facebook’s Live video feed. So there’s no control.

A good, high-quality professional video streaming solution is going to put you in control of what high quality video and audio you want to broadcast to your audience. Its platform is going to be just for doing that. Not associating your brand with the same place people go to look at cat pictures and yell at other sports team fans.

While some of these consumer-oriented services are fairly compatible across devices, not all of them are. And plenty are compatible across most devices. By definition, there’s going to be a fair amount of bloat in whatever application, which has to be installed prior for some devices, supports live video streaming. That’s not good for ensuring that you’re delivering a seamless high-quality live video feed to a captive audience.

All of those other services were services for something else before they went “and we can do video streaming too”. They’re not purpose-built solutions for the presenter or for the audience.

Presenters actually face a number of challenges in actually hosting a webinar. For one, there’s a range of compatibility challenges with making sure that the live stream service is compatible with the capture software the presenter is using like OBS studio or other pieces of software.

With a wide range of out-of-the-box compatibility and a though and active support feature, Samba Live is a great solution for ensuring the seamless configuration and compatibility on the presenter’s end, all the way through to the simplicity and quality that’s on the user’s end. That’s purpose-built software that gives you all the tools to ensure audience engagement.

User features and participation elements

Video streaming in 2019 is about much more than just a chatroom slapped over a live audio/video feed. It’s about projecting presence.

Nothing beats being there in person to each and every one of your audience members. But Samba Live comes as close as currently possible to doing that. In order to do that, there has to be more ways for any audience member to engage than just a text box, and more than that. They have to understand how to interact with the live video stream.

This is accomplished by having a ton of different ways of connecting, and features that work on virtually all of them. Before setting up a webinar or webcast, the presenter has to be able to craft exactly what features they need to ensure the audience members are engaged. Samba Live has a rich set of features to let audience members feel as close to being in the same room as the presenter as possible.

There are many scenarios where live video presentations are used, and each of them has nuances with it that demand different sets of features.

Do you want your audience to be able to ask questions? Do you want them to be able to comment in real-time? Do you plan on asking questions to the entire audience like in a poll, and get valuable feedback in real-time? What if you happen to capture a unique moment in your live production; were you pre-recording?

These are all things to consider before promoting your webcast and gathering the audience. You don’t want to be stuck with a webcasting tool that doesn’t offer a total solution for all the features of how you want your webcast to work.

Digital Samba has made software for people with the same diverse and nuanced set of challenges that go with addressing audiences over the internet for decades. Just by looking at the kind of features they have developed and are available to you can inspire presenters to structure their live broadcasts in more productive ways.

Diversity and adaptability

There is no one size fits all solution for live video streaming and web conferencing. However, you can come close.

In a major organization there are going to be a diversity of needs. Some highly planned, some impromptu. Some of them need to be more about collaboration, and others need to be more about presentation.

What if you could do all of these things under one roof? You can!

Technologically, all of these fundamentally different needs are all similar to one another. Digital Samba has put their experience and talent together to make a package that covers all of these needs in an elegantly simple way with incredible flexibility and feature-depth.

When streaming a live broadcasting service, the unexpected can happen. What makes the distinction from the unexpected being terrifying to being exciting is how well prepared you are for it.

Samba Live comes with all of the preparation tools you need to manage the not-fully-predictable nature of live video and live audio. That includes administrative tools that allow you to efficiently and seamlessly moderate your audience.

Sleek, seamless design and integration

The design of Samba Live is focused around integrating their solution with every available platform, and keeping the usability simple for the end user. In short, the best design uses as least design as possible. A rich set of features are intuitively available there and accessible to use at any time, using them feels as natural to presenters as gesturing with their hands.

Features like screen sharing feel normal while they are in fact quite technically advanced pieces of technology to have so seamlessly integrated into hosting your webinars.

Users enjoy a sleek optimized interface that allows them to mesh in with the content being presented. Features and tools are there when they are necessities. They are not distractions or in the way at all of the experience of true online presence.

The design language used in Digital Samba’s product is that the user must instantly know what it’s for, and how to use it. There has to be quality, and purpose behind every feature. There can be no feature that does not have both.

This leaves a simple, pure, elegant and streamlined design experience that is both functional and beautiful. It’s a product that is beautiful to use, and that is the platform from which great ideas are shared.

Price and delivery of service

Samba Live is comparatively affordable for what it is.This is because when comparing pricing to other professional platforms, few other developers have actually made their online webcasting solutions from scratch. Digital Samba is a barebones innovator in this industry. For Samba Live, there are no stacks of middle-men between the client and the developer. This results in a very straightforward relationship, and a clear pricing schedule.

Try our free trial to experience Samba Live and to see what your organization can do with the cutting-edge video conferencing platform. Support technicians are also available to answer and facilitate any technical questions and to suss out the implementation of Samba Live in your organization’s operation.